Today, smartphones and other mobile devices are fully integrated into many people's lives. An increasing trend is to augment these powerful computing devices with wearable devices such as smart watches, sensors such as fitness bands, heart rate monitors, etc. Wearable devices provide greater convenience, e.g., it is much easier to glance at a watch on your wrist rather than to retrieve a smartphone out of your pocket or bag. Accordingly, wearable devices allow for quicker and more discrete notifications and interactions.
Using wireless technology, smartphones act as gateways, relaying messages to wearable devices, thus allowing users to interact with something being worn rather than their smartphone to, e.g., read an incoming message. Today, smartwatches can notify the user via a sound, vibration or notification on the screen regarding, e.g., a new text message, email, etc. The use of a vibration is often preferable in that it cannot be heard or seen by others, which avoids being socially or physically distracting.
Currently however, vibration-based notifications are limited to simple haptic alerts. As such, it is impossible to convey in depth information without the user viewing or otherwise interrogating the wearable device or smartphone, e.g., vibrations cannot be utilized to convey whether the notification is important or who it is from. Thus, e.g., there is no means for a text message to be relayed to a user without the user looking at their display or listening to the message being broadcast via speech synthesis.